Painkiller

Sometimes I can't help but wonder why certain games prioritise multiplayer or cooperative elements. When you look at {Anshar Studios}' {Painkiller}, immediately you are reminded of a {Doom}-like adventure crammed with vile demons to slay and epic and bombastic weapons to put to good use. There's even an interesting premise and plot at the core revolving around helping the {Voice of the Creator Metatron} put a stop to the plans of the fallen angel {Azazel}, by travelling around {Purgatory} and ultimately defeating his three savage children known as the {Nephilim}. Again, at surface value, at a macro level, {Painkiller} has all the pieces in place to be an interesting action shooter and yet because of an emphasis on cooperative multiplayer, it struggles to stick the landing.

Picture this. Take one of the modern {Doom} games that so many of us are familiar with and then scale each level down to around a third of its size and adjust the setup so that there's less of a natural progression and more of an emphasis on clearing arenas of enemies. Then take these shorter missions and lock each behind different multiplayer queues, where you are unable to play solo but have to either play with AI bots, friends, or random folk online. You still get to work through quite well put together levels with impressive visuals, and master a movement and shooting system that is rewarding in practice, but gone is a story that you can divulge much interest from and the emphasis on levelling and collecting resources for limited purposes all mean that there's too much of a focus on replayability and not enough on memorable scenarios.

This is {Painkiller}. It's a game that has elements and features that you can appreciate but they're buried beneath a mountain of mediocrity that's hard to get excited about. There are four characters that have very minor unique traits and backstories that you never want to learn about, and there are six weapons to unlock and upgrade, which is a fine number and variety but there's not enough missions to warrant unlocking and levelling them all. And this is my biggest gripe with {Painkiller}; it simply feels like an Early Access game's worth of content.

What you get here is three Raids split into three missions each that on the regular difficulty might take you three hours collectively to beat if you're slow. Then there's a roguelike mode too that granted is quite fun and perhaps the best way to play {Painkiller}, but it's also quite rudimentary and only supports around 30 minutes of gameplay a time on the average difficulty. {Anshar} attempts to circumvent this by encouraging you to take on each Raid or the roguelike mode on harder difficulties to expand the length of the gameplay, but there's next to no reason to do so, as the progression is basic and mostly consists of a card-collection system coming in the form of the Tarot element.

The Tarot is an interesting system but it's fundamentally at the mercy of the game's economy as to draw a card you need to spend gold, which is sparingly picked up during missions. So the loop presents itself as such; take on easier missions to earn gold and use that to draw Tarot cards to be able to stand a better chance in the harder difficulties. Again, it's a system that makes sense in theory but in practice when you've seen everything there is to see after a handful of hours you can't help but wonder why you'd bother trying each mission on a harder difficulty. It's not as though {Painkiller} is a looter-shooter that rewards better gear for your effort. You just do it for the love of the game, which is an issue as there's not a compelling story at the core and the progression - beyond collecting Tarot cards that are destroyed after you use them in a run - is lacking to say the least.

And so again we come full circle because each and every time I play {Painkiller}, I can't help but feel as though this game fundamentally has the wrong idea. There's tight and rewarding enough gunplay and movement here that when combined with the array of enemies and the good-looking visuals could have formed the basis necessary to support a great action story. But instead we don't get that. What we get is an {FBC: Firebreak}-like situation where it's not nearly a trainwreck but you also find yourself struggling for reasons to return or to recommend to friends. I'm not usually a quantity over quality person, but it does feel like this game needed twice the available content to keep it going, because I can't imagine {Anshar} will be given the same level of leniency as {Remedy} has given itself to get {FBC: Firebreak} back on track, which is proving to be a challenge. And this is assuming {Anshar} even has plans to expand {Painkiller} significantly down the line.

So ultimately, I feel as though {Painkiller} has a tough road ahead of itself. The development team shows signs of quality and development prowess in some of the title's features, but at the same time, {Painkiller} asks quite a lot from a consumer and doesn't give a whole lot back in return.